“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. I mean it,” he added quickly.
“To get back to Joe the Nuts,” said Roseboom.
“Just a minute,” said Harry. There was a pause of ten or fifteen seconds, then Harry braked the car to a near stop and turned sharply to the right, up a dirt road that was really only two ruts through a vacant lot overgrown with brown marsh grass. They breasted a low hill—really a sand dune, Roseboom realized—and saw the ocean. Harry let the car roll ahead a little into softening sand and then stopped it and turned off the motor. “Come on,” said Harry. They got out of the car. Roseboom sank to his ankles in soft, hot sand. “Leave your shoes and socks.” Roseboom sat on the wide running board and pulled them off. He knocked the shoes together, sending a cloud of sand downwind. “Don’t get it on the car,” called Harry.
Roseboom caught up with him, and they trudged together through the sand and grass tufts toward a tall oblong structure half on the beach and half in the low surf. There was a rusty metal ladder set in its landward side. Harry shouldered ahead, heaved himself up, and continued to climb without a word. Roseboom saw him disappear into a low doorway about twenty feet from the ground and then followed him. Roseboom heaved himself into a low-celinged room about thirty feet square and saw Harry on the seaward side, looking out a narrow horizontal window. The walls, Roseboom saw, must have been a foot thick. There were pocks and cracks in them, and bits of rusty reinforcing skeleton were visible here and there. He guessed that the thing must have been fifty feet high altogether. “What’s upstairs?”
“Another room like this. Roof. We could go up there now, but it’s like a frying pan this time of day.” He intercepted Roseboom’s look. “Watchtower left from War Two. There were a lot of tankers getting sunk off this coast. There’d be six or eight guys in here, Coast Guard, all weathers, looking for submarines, smoke, like that.”
Roseboom looked at him with a grin. “Not bugged?”
“Someday the thing’ll fall into the water. Anyway, I don’t think anybody knows the way I come here. At least nobody ever followed me or was here, except some kids who come to roast marshmallows and screw and like that.”
“You come here often.”
“Oh, yeah. I like to watch the sea,” he said simply, looking out the view slit again.
“How did you know your own place was bugged?”
“Well, I did it myself. Early in the game, that was. Then somebody, I don’ know, maybe Christmas Angel, some of the boys, added some little hickeys of their own. You can hear ‘em on the phones. Lights dim out every once in a while. You’d be surprised—no, I guess you wouldn’t—at what goes on in those back rooms some nights.” Roseboom nodded and continued to look straight at Harry, who wiped his rust-stained palms on his spotless white bell-bottomed slacks, looked once around the room, then back out at the ocean.
“You bought into Decline And Fall in nineteen sixty-six,” prompted Roseboom.
“Oh, yeah. I came back here, tried to pick up my practice. You know. I had this big-ass house down the coast, in Lochmere, on the Bay. Hundred’n a quarter thousand. Pool. Heated pool. Vacuum cleaners in the baseboards. Boat dock. Big playroom. You know how I felt when I saw that playroom. Jesus Christ.
“Well, I tried to stick it out there. The place wasn’t quite paid off, I had a good practice, lots of consulting work, my own lab, four bright young kid associates, going to all be partners someday. Whole floor in a new building. Eight chairs, little operating theater, even. Mostly just for show,
“And. I never had much time to indulge myself, really, just in that upper-middle suburbs kind of way. The lawn. The parties. The concerts. Running the pie throw at the church fair. You know. I really didn’t know how to go about it any other way.
“I tried. I had the people from Dunhill’s come down and survey the place, turn the next-to-biggest bathroom into a room-size humidor. Bought three thousand Royal Jamaica Churchills. Ever smoke a Churchill?” Roseboom shook his head. “Here. Buck twenty-five a crack.”
Roseboom did not smoke. He took the big cigar anyway.
“Then I called Frederick Wildman. I don’t mean Frederick Wildman’s goddamn secretary, I mean Frederick. Wildman. He came down. Him. We put together a wine and cordial cellar. He also sold me a couple of barrels of scotch. Glenlivet Waters, it’s called. Apparently they don’t bottle it at all. That’s how Decline And Fall got such a reputation for wines and brandies, by the way. That’s my cellar down in the cellar. If you follow me.
“I drank the scotch,” he added after a pause.
“Then I had a few more alterations made. A sauna. A seven-foot-deep bathtub. That just about killed my wife’s insurance. Turned the Buick in on a Cad with a few refinements. Mostly a bar.
“I got myself a maid after the first couple of big dinner parties I gave to dispel the...what? It wasn’tgloom, exactly... A maid, after a decent period of mourning. Lives-in-gives-out, as the saying goes. That was a little girl. Between her and that fountain of booze, I wouldn’t have lasted long. It was that empty, empty house. And I hadn’t even gotten started on drugs yet.” He was talking quietly, conversationally, but Roseboom saw that he was wringing his hands very slowly and very hard.
“Then one night. I think it was New Year’s, sixty-six, I was driving along Oceanic Avenue, blitzed out of my mind, as usual, when all of a sudden, this fire engine comes blasting by me on theright. Of course I was probably driving on the left anyway. Well, this aroused some atavistic drunk-ass response in me, so I took off chasing it. Now that was a wild ride. I should mention that there were a bunch of others behind me. I kept those red lights in sight up ahead and drove. Spray was coming over the seawall and freezing in the air, and that road was just like glass. Anyway, I stayed alive until I came up on the place that was burning. I spun out turning into the lot—hit the big marble seal by the exit sign—and crumpled the Cad up a little.
“Anyway, I was out there looking over the damage, freezing to death and staggering and falling on my face, half from ice and half from booze, up comes this little guy with tears running down his face, yelling, ‘No insurance! No insurance! No insurance even for fires! You might’s well go away, no money for you here!”
“Well, I told him I wasn’t going to sue, it was my fault, I was drunk, and so on for about a minute. After the third time I said ‘drunk,’ his face lit up, and he grabbed me and hugged me and said ‘Me, too!’ And be damned if he didn’t have half a Pinch bottle under his apron,
“So then, we got in the Cad and watched the fire and butchered the Pinch. What he’d left. The place didn’t burn badly, just a lot of decor and the kitchen wiped out. And there were some fur coats and so on that they were going to be liable for. Just for the record, his name was Tibor Telredy, and the place was called Ungaria, Goulash Our Specialty. Telredy was a Hungarian Freedom Fighter who’d gone into his family pretty deep to set up the place; his mother did the cooking, his father played violin and so on, besides their life savings on the line. He just hadn’t had anything left over for insurance.
“I don’t know if it was booze, boredom, or genius, but I started to talk the deal right then and there. Him being drunk didn’t hurt any. Anyhow, we worked it out, sitting there in that bunged-up Cadillac with the heater running fit to roast your ass off, guzzling raw booze right from that bulky bottle. My collar was wilted next morning from what ran down my chin that night. Anyhow, we worked it out. I’d cover all his liabilities, pay for incidentals like legal fees and so on, and buy him out for...” Harry looked appraisingly at the FBI man for a second. “If you want to know, I guess you could find out. Ninety thou. Go on, you say it if you want. Others have accused me of setting bombs in orphanages.
“I had to sell the house to cover it all, which wasn’t a bad idea. Didn’t take much of a loss. It cost me about forty to cover liabilities—there were a few cars on fire behind the place that he neglected to point out at the time—and about another sixty to get the place fixed up the way
I wanted. The way it is now. With my penthouse on the third floor, the pool tables, the stage and all. You know, I looked up the original title on that land and house. Decline And Fall is a restaurant, bar, cocktail lounge, grill, and cabaret with occasional dinner-theater, which can seat four hundred people on two floors and in the Wine Cellar Room. It was built in nineteen ten as a summer house for one family! We’ve lost something somewhere.”
“What happened to the former owner?”
“I got a postcard from him about a year ago. He’s teaching Slavic history at Southern California. Asked if I wanted to join the Minutemen.”
“Did you?”
“Why should I? When I’ve got the Mafia?”
They looked each other in the eye for a little while, and then Harry looked back out to sea.
“Well, Decline And Fall opened, all right. I handed over the practice to the boys—taught them how to incorporate, first—and arranged for them to pay me a percentage for ninety-nine years or until my death, whichever happens first. Then I moved in on the third floor and tended bar and washed glasses. Didn’t even get help, at first. But this resort-area trade just keeps coming and coming. I got tired out at last. But it took time to build up a clientele, especially without a working kitchen—I didn’t know much about the business then—and I had some problems.”
“Such as what?”
“I’ll skip over the little ones, because you want to hear about Joe and the Family. Anyway, that summer, there was a motorcycle gang hit town. Remember?”
“No.”
“Well, they hit it. First it was just messing around a lot in the streets. Then the cops got on ‘em and they had to go to ground someplace.” Harry looked over his shoulder at the FBI man. “Usually it’s a bar they pick.”
“And it was yours.”
“You bet it was. My regular customers—gone! The furniture was crumbling. The bastards never drank anything but draft beer and they’d get on a jag where they’d break glasses after each round. Then they dragged some woman in off the street and just about gangbanged her on the pool table before I got back from upstairs with the shotgun. I kept it under the bar after that.”
“Got a permit?”
“You be damned. Anyhow, that cooled them down a little. Things were halfway back to normal. Things looked good, I was meeting expenses and beating trade out of the other locals. Then. Then one night the Big Sprocket or whatever they call him got paroled and crushed into town from California. The whole bunch came in and set up a long course of getting pie-eyed for themselves. They chased off the other customers in about five minutes.
“Except for a bunch of guys sitting in the back. In the big booth. These were guys I’d never seen before, off a charter boat. They were the usual fishing types—baseball caps, polo shirts, three-day beards—you know. They weren’t paying any attention to what was going on up front, and the Big Sprocket saw that they weren’t. He hitched up his jeans and walked back there and told them to buy a round for the house or get the hell out. One says, ‘Can we drink up before we leave?’ but Big Sprocket had wandered away.
“I guess somebody must’ve gone to the phone. I don’t know who or when. Anyway, a half hour later, Big Sprock remembered them, and he went back with a mug of beer in each hand and said, ‘Are you mutherfuckers still here?’ And the first guy he’d talked to stood up, very soft-spoken and almost fatherly, and said, ‘We better take this discussion outside,’ and Big Sprocket says, ‘You bet your ass we better,’ and he led the way out, with his whole mob following him. And those fishing types.
“By that time, I was on the phone, but somebody’d popped the wires out. So I had a gin-gin and I got the shotgun and filled my pockets with shells and started for the porch. By then, there were sounds of a real, earnest difference of opinion to be heard issuing from the front parking lot.” Harry grinned and smacked his lips at the memory.
“I opened those swinging doors and walked out like Long John Silver onto that quarterdeck,” said Harry, “and there was quite a rumble out there. But it was just about over. Down at the end of each driveway, somebody had parked a dump truck. In the middle of the lot there was a big pile of motorcycle parts. There were four or five guys down there, taking their time about tossing these little bits of motorcycles onto the one truck, the one parked in the ‘enter’ driveway. Then there were four or five guys with sledgehammers and spud bars tearing what must’ve been the last few motorcycles apart and throwing the bits and pieces onto the pile. And right in front of the big front steps were forty or fifty guys with baseball bats, brass knucks, sandbags, blackjacks, loaded canes, and what-all, just beating the living hell out of Big Sprocket and his mob.
“I just sort of stood there. Frozen, you know, at the sight. I thought I was really going to have to shoot somebody, and I was so relieved that I didn’t have to, at least right away, that I just fell into one of those big rattan chairs. You saw ‘em, the ones on the front porch for the neckers and honeymooners, moon over the vasty sea, and all that. Then, somebody put a hand on my shoulder. I practically had a stroke. Then I looked over beside me. There were those fishermen, sitting in these chairs, taking their lordly ease, sipping fresh boozes—and I don’t know where they came from, I didn’t serve ‘em—watching the show just like they’d watch the Wednesday night fights.
“ ‘Here, old buddy,’ says one of them, the one closest to me, who’d put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Have a drink. These are almost as good as yours.’ And I took it. What it was, I couldn’t tell you. I made it go in three seconds, and he grinned at me, and squeezed my shoulder really buddy-buddy and handed me another one.
“Well, to keep from boring you, those guys in the lot and in the driveway finished beating those motorbikers to a bloody pulp and disposing of their mounts at the same time. Some of them took a whack or two at some of the bodies, then started to throw the remains onto the other truck, the one parked in the exit.
“ ‘Hey, Frank!’ the guy beside me calls out. One of the batmen turned and came a few paces toward us. ‘Dump ‘em in the quarry. My quarry, not yours. Show ‘em the Hand.’ And the guy nodded and laughed and went about his business. Then the guy next to me turned and said, ‘And now a gentleman can drink in peace,’ and he drained his drink. Then he said, ‘You’ve got one of the best places I ever saw. Come on back in and build us some more.’ Then he said, ‘You like Italian food?’ “
Harry looked at Roseboom. “I guess that was the first hint I ever had.” Roseboom nodded.
“We got back into the bar,” said Harry, “and I was setting them up for the house—the fishermen and about five others—when he introduced himself. ‘I’m Joe Nucci,’ he said, and I told him who I was. He nodded and said, ‘Uh-huh. Glad to meet you.’ Then he told me who the other guys were.” Harry looked at Roseboom again. “All out-of-towners, except Christmas Angel.”
“Yeah,” said Roseboom.
“Well, we all socked ‘em down with both hands for about two hours, and a couple of guys all covered with dust, T-shirts, work pants, you know, came in, and they looked at Joe and he lifted his eyebrows and they just nodded and sat down at the other end of the bar. I just served them two triples and they said ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Thank you.’
“I guess it was that ‘Italian food’ business that got Joe and I talking about...business. ‘Goddamn it, Harry old buddy,’ he kept saying, ‘a guy who runs such a hell of a bar has got to have a kitchen, too! And what could it be with a name like that but a guinea kitchen?’ And I explained how I was going to get the kitchen running early next year, with help and all, and hire a pianist, and have a free lunch in the bar, and he kept pounding on the bar and hissing, ‘Yeah! Right! Great!’ Hell, I told it to him just like it is now—you saw it. And he nodded, and grinned, and kept punching me in the shoulder, and I never had a chance to think about closing time, so they stayed till four thirty. But somebody thought to shut off the sign.” Harry stared off at the sea, remembering. “We were telling each other our life s
tories all night. Then he waved from the front porch, wiggled his fingers, he still had a drink in each hand, and he yelled, ‘Don’t forget what I said, Harry, boy!’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry any more about that dentist shit! You’re a community service now!’ “ Harry turned around. “And you know, I’m as good a restaurateur as I ever was an orthodontist?”
“What then?” asked Roseboom.
“Well, I started to get phone calls. This designer. That manufacturer. Beautiful terms. If I sounded reluctant, why, they’d come down a few thousand! I couldn’t afford not to get that goddamn kitchen all outfitted and working! Then, when the stuff was all installed, and painted, and the drawers full of knives and like that, and we had lots of flour and all around, this fat guy comes walking in one day. ‘I am Ercole Barone,’ he says. ‘Where is my kitchen?’ “ Harry paused. “You don’t know who Ercole Barone is.”
“No,” said Roseboom. “Should I?”
Harry sighed. “Vulgarian,” he said. “I shouldn’t say that, because I didn’t know myself. All I knew was that this huge guy who looked like Oliver Hardy, if Oliver Hardy had been born in Rome, had come in and started to turn out these unbelievable meals. There was one sent to me on the third floor, every day, nine a.m., three thirty, and nine p.m., unless I sent word to hold it. My God,” said Harry, remembering.
Orbit 8 - [Anthology] Page 6
